Many businesses outsource portions of their information technology (IT) needs to IT outsourcing providers. These providers usually make their business more efficient by constructing large data centers. The data centers offer a variety of different computing resources and services to multiple customers, each of whom may have different IT requirements. The relationship between the providers and their customers is typically governed by a Service Level Agreement (SLA) that sets forth the provider's various objectives regarding the level of service that will be available to a particular customer and the penalties that will be incurred if the service level objectives are not met. For instance, depending on a level of service selected by a customer, the SLA may specify time windows (i.e., the days of the week and hours) of availability and certain performance metrics or quality of service (QoS) guarantees, such as the percentage availability of the services during the time windows, average response time of the service, etc. The terms of SLAs also typically include limitations that may exempt the service provider from meeting its objectives, such as brown-out conditions, force majeure events, etc.
However, in many instances, the service provider and the service recipient have not formally or completely defined the underlying details of the limitations and exemptions in the SLA. Thus, when an SLA violation has occurred, the parties often are faced with resolving the issue through an arbitration process in which the parties deliberate whether or not a specific failure to meet an objective is the fault of the service provider and whether or not a penalty should be assessed as a result of the violation. This process is time-consuming and costly and potentially results in friction between the service provider and customer.